Yes, you can teach that, absolutely. You can teach it in school, you can teach media literacy. I think Canada ought to have a media literacy component in its public schools. There's no better way to teach it than to give a 13-year-old girl a bunch of advertisements that are clearly targeted towards her and then have her break down the arguments presented to her, to break down the messages and use them to create something new and different, something that's her own contribution to that discourse. Unfortunately, the way our legal system works right now, that's completely illegal. But I think we ought to encourage media literacy.
The other part of my job is with the Mozilla Foundation, and there we call it hacking when you can see how something works and take it apart. A big part of the reason the Internet is successful is that anybody can click a button that says “View Source” and see how that web page has been put together. I think we ought to be able to do the same thing to the media messages thrown at us every day. You can't walk down the street without being sold something by a media company. That's happening every day.
So I think we ought to encourage, in a democratic society, this communication to be a bit more two-way.